Over the last decade, budget pressures and a steep rise in the number of proposals have had an impact on researchers and funding agencies in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The decreasing success rate of individual proposals, a general decrease in funding levels in many agencies, and increased reviewer load has been a topic of concern within the community. Consequently, a working group has been formed under the auspices of AAAC, including representatives from CAS, CAA, AAS, and NAC, in consultation with representatives from the relevant divisions of NSF, DOE and NASA. Its purpose is to evaluate the effect of this changing environment on the health of the field, specifically addressing whether this will result in an unacceptable restrictions in the range of new scientific initiatives and negatively impact career choices of the most promising researchers. It is already creating an unsustainable load on reviewers and has led the agencies to consider solutions to the problem (such as reducing the frequency of solicitations or restricting the number of proposals per year). This working group will gather relevant demographic data in order to understand how the funding environment over the last 10 years has affected researchers and projects. Of particular concern is the balance between National Labs and Universities, and between individual researcher grants and large projects. We will compare funding models across agencies and determine appropriate metrics for evaluating success. This will allow us to provide data-driven projections of the impact of such trends in the future, as well as that of any proposed solutions.
The specific tasks are